John-Paul Davidson's movie 'Seve' tracks Ballesteros’s rise from the restless
scamp practising on Pedreña beach to his five major championships

“Golf is not how, it’s how many,” Seve Ballesteros intones in this charming document of a life lavishly lived. It is a philosophy that colours every frame of John-Paul Davidson’s film Seve, equal parts honeyed biopic and faithful documentary, as it tracks Ballesteros’s rise from the restless scamp practising with his three iron on Pedreña beach to his anointment as The Open’s first “car park champion”, lifting his maiden Claret Jug at Lytham despite hitting a drive so wretched at the 16th that it finished under a car’s front bumper. As Gary Player once observed, while most champions of the age could concoct around 20 ways of shooting 65, Cantabria’s most charismatic son had closer to 1,500.

For a shade over two hours, Seve revels in Ballesteros’s tweaking of the noses of golf’s establishment. Here was a wunderkind who mounted a revolution from outside the gates, leaping over the high stone walls that demarcated Royal Pedreña Golf Club just to hit a few clandestine shots at dusk. For this was an institution founded by Spain’s King Alfonso XIII as a retreat for the landed gentry. The notion of extending membership to the son of a shepherd, a mere peasant boy, was unthinkable. The pinnacle of his future aspirations was to caddie for token pesetas, to escape the job that his mother, Carmen, had lined up for him in the Santander shipyards.

It is from this childhood struggle that Seve derives its heroism, and the film its cinematic punch. “Señoras y señores, muchas gracias,” he tells the Lytham crowd in 1976, after finishing Open runner-up at 19 behind Johnny Miller, conveying the innate star wattage of a young man who had not yet mastered English. Producer Stephen Evans claims he realised early that the drama would pivot upon these formative years, when Seve was forced to refine his long-iron technique in the company of a few frightened sheep.

But how to find the child who would authentically channel all the grievances, resentments and thwarted dreams of the young Ballesteros as he toiled to escape a one-horse town like Pedreña, where the only privately owned car belonged to his uncle Ramon?

The search took months, as Evans looked in vain through the field at the Spanish junior championship for a starlet with that swarthy, handsome Ballesteros look. Only a chance telephone call from a friend on the Costa Verde yielded the answer, in the form of 16-year-old Santander native José Luis Gutiérrez. In his consuming obsession with golf –falling asleep in class, after one too many evenings swatting rocks with his makeshift club on the deserted sands – Gutiérrez is often a captivating presence, although arguably a touch too cherubic and winsome for his own good. The depictions of home on the range, with Mum holding a thread and needle and Dad slouching in an armchair in his plaid shirt, can be cornily oversimplistic.

More vexed episodes of Ballesteros’s youth – not least two-year-old brother Manuel being stung to death by a swarm of wasps, or the background of father Baldomero shooting himself in the hand to avoid joining the resistance to Franco – are glossed over. That said, it is devilishly difficult to crowbar the emotional range of Seve’s 54 years of life into 124 minutes. Director Davidson settles, ultimately, for a novel flashback structure whereby scenes of callow innocence are designed to prefigure each of Ballesteros’s five major triumphs. Thus does the majestic sweep of a Pedreña sunset segue into footage of his stunning win in the 1980 Masters, the first by a European at Augusta.

Only a week before slipping on the green jacket, Ballesteros had been made acutely aware of his obscurity to the American audience, as he found himself introduced at a function as “Ballerina Sevasteros”. As he puts it, as part of the narration: “They never did say my name wrong again.”

It is in this context that we can begin to appreciate his habit in the early Eighties of demanding exorbitant appearance fees, branded distasteful at the time. “Between the ages of six and 23 I gave my whole life to golf,” he reflects. “The game owed me something back.”

Much of the tension, as we build towards Ballesteros’s breakthrough, comes from the fact that he has no safety net. In one of the film’s more startling sequences, he is expelled from school after reacting bitterly to a caning from his schoolmistress. Alone at the homestead, he glugs back the best part of a bottle of red wine, runs back to class and shoves the teacher against the blackboard, crying bitterly: “Only my father is allowed to beat me!” His mother, worried that her youngest son will have no qualifications, sends him to private tuition with a woman she knows at the fish market, while Baldomero chews over the swelling whispers around Pedreña that Seve might become the greatest player in the world.

It is this faith in a precarious hope that sets up the film’s centrepiece, the winner-takes-all match where a 13-year-old Ballesteros takes on Eduardo de la Riva, the region’s under-25 champion, for 50,000 pesetas. A little artistic licence is at play here: Ballesteros disclosed in his autobiography that the prize was only 30,000 pesetas, and gave no mention that his father, as suggested by the film, sold off the family’s two finest fatted calves to help raise the money. It smacks of the filmmakers, perhaps inspired by the parable of the prodigal son, angling for a biblical subtext.

But the unfolding of the contest with De la Riva, not to mention his rich father, is brilliantly told. The match is unambiguously pitched as a class war, as a nervous Baldomero says to Seve: “We own a meadow – they own half of Santander.”

If ever you sought a clue from his formative years for why Ballesteros became so madly energised by the Ryder Cup, here it is: he perceived the Americans, just like the De la Rivas, as the wealthy sheriffs, and himself as Robin Hood. Sadly, the Ryder Cup chapter feels, within this film’s jumpy chronology, more like an afterthought or a potted history uncomfortably appended to the narrative of Seve’s major-winning years.

Indeed, it is the later, bleaker period of Ballesteros’s life that receives the most cursory of treatment. When I travelled to Pedreña to conduct what would be his last interview in 2010, after his 18-month ordeal with brain cancer, he was lonely and desperately vulnerable. But the film appears to acknowledge that when Seve’s name is invoked, viewers crave memories of his flamboyance and his astonishing gifts above any focus on the harsher complexities in his character.

In the end, as Sir Nick Faldo, dissolving in tears at the funeral in the summer of 2011, reminded us: “He was just a kid from his village.”